With the increasing demands on data communication systems, particularly cable, optical, wireless and/or other systems where a portion of the corresponding signaling is carried over long distances through a wireline medium (e.g., copper or fiber), it may be beneficial for those operators and service providers to upgrade the capacity of their systems to over 1 Gb/sec. To keep upgrade costs down, operators are interested in having a node or endpoint size of up-to 500 homes passed. An analysis of this high-frequency spectrum has shown that a conventional tree-and-branch architecture may experience random noise funneling, particularly when there is attenuation within the associated bandwidth. This attenuation can causes a received upstream signal to have a low signal-to-noise ratio, and if, a sufficient number of these noisy signals are combined, the uncorrelated random noise may grow as 10*log(N), where N is the number of noisy lines combined. One solution to this problem is to limit node size, such as to 64 homes or fewer, in order to ameliorate the number of noisy signals being combined. The solution, however, may be disadvantageous since it may result in high upgrade costs.